Category: Nuclear Power

Friday, April 14, 2017

In any given year, a handful of companies file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in the United States. Rarely, however, does one of these filings reverberate beyond the boardroom and into the realm of geopolitics. Those that do — Lehman Brothers in 2008, or the "Big Three" U.S. automakers in 2008-10 — usually involve hundreds of billions of dollars. But the next big geopolitically relevant bankruptcy may be on the horizon, and the amount of money involved is tiny next to the collapses of the past decade.

Monday, September 19, 2016

Theresa May's government has once more shown its inherent weakness where after putting the French / Chinese Hinkley Point C nuclear build on hold in July has now backed down under Chinese threats of withholding investments by giving the go ahead to build a nuclear reactor that had never been proven to actually work with potentially disastrous consequences for our small densely populated Island.

Thursday, July 07, 2016

Let's for a second imagine a world without nuclear energy. That's a tough one but let's try. No nuclear bombs, of course, no Chernobyl and Fukushima, no worries about Iran and North Korea. A wonderful world, maybe?

Probably not, because without nuclear energy we would have burned millions more tons of coal and billions more barrels of oil. This would have brought about climate change of such proportions that what we have today would have seemed negligible.

Wednesday, November 26, 2014

A funny thing happened on the way to a nuclear-free world — Japan realized what a stupid idea that was.

You will probably recall that in the wake of the earthquake/tsunami/Fukushima nuclear disaster Japan shuttered its 50 nuclear power plants, which were supplying between 30% and 40% of the island-nation’s electricity needs. For the first time in more than three decades, Japan was totally dependent on non-nuclear fuels. The country became a poster-child for a nuclear-free future, and countries including Germany, Italy, Sweden and others followed suit, announcing they, too, would phase-out nuclear energy.

Thursday, March 20, 2014

First the Politics
March 18, newswires starting strangely with Kuwait's KUNA, reported that protesters from French environmental action groups, headed by Greenpeace and supported by activists of the EELV political party which is part of French president Hollande's parliamentary coalition, broke into France's oldest nuclear power plant (NPP) at Fessenheim located on the Franco-German border in Alsace, and occupied several parts of the operating section and its roof. Their claims were given considerable coverage by French media, if only to keep minds off Putin's victory in Crimea, fustigated as an “illegal act” by Hollande and his Foreign minister. One immediate result of this is the halt to construction, in French shipyards of two high tech missile-launch destroyers for the Russian navy, one of the ships named 'Sebastopol', in a contract worth about 1.5 billion euros.

Tuesday, February 25, 2014

The draft of Japan's new Basic Energy Plan, made public on Tuesday, calls nuclear power an “important baseload electricity source”, effectively reversing or heavily diluting the 2012 datsu genpatsu – “escape from nuclear” – decision, or outline decision made by Naoto Kan the more left-leaning predecessor of Shinzo Abe. Naoto Kan's escape plan, however, gave no specific timelines to close all of Japan’s atomic power plants, only saying this would happen “over the next several decades”, in stark contrast with Angela Merkel's political decision of May 2011 to close all German nuclear power plants (NPPs) by January 1st, 2022.

Monday, January 20, 2014

A record high level of beta rays released from radioactive strontium-90 has been detected at the crippled Fukushima nuclear power plant beneath the No. 2 reactor’s well facing the ocean, according to the facility’s operator.

Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) measured the amount of beta ray-emitting radioactivity at more than 2.7 million becquerels per liter, Fukushima’s operator said as reported in Japanese media. The measurements were taken on Thursday.

Sunday, December 15, 2013

RATIONALIST ILLUSIONS - THE JAMES FEARON ANALYSIS
Events in the East China Sea since 2009, and especially since midyear 2013 have thrust the following frightening question forward: are China and Japan imminently going to war? Conventional answers to the affirmative point to deep historical mistrust, economic rivalry and jealousy as China moves far ahead of Japan in world ranking by GDP, and a large level of “unfinished business” in their own bilateral relations, and in East Asian regional politics, stemming from Showa Japan’s imperial rampage across Asia. To be sure, rationalists draw a long list of reasons why China and Japan are not going to war. There would be astronomical economic costs from a war that pitted the world’s second and third largest economies against each other, with the first and biggest economy, the USA almost surely, or at least possibly dragged in by third-largest Japan, in a war that started over a few tiny islands, underseas rocks, and possible or potential hydrocarbon reserves.

Wednesday, December 11, 2013

LIBERAL DEMOCRATIC DISASTER
Abenomics has come, but is already on its way out. A short-term pack of phony reforms to befuddle public opinion, buy time, and develop new bad panic responses to Japan's enduring economic crisis. Because this is New Normal anywhere in the former rich nations - which are called “advanced industrial” as well as “postindustral” (well exhibiting their cognitive dissonance, schizophrenia and existential crisis) - Shinzo Abe and his clique of crony corporate profiteers stumble along to their next crisis with their heads held high. TEPCO, until March 2011, was a peer-respected player in the crony corporate court circus close to power. Today it is special – because it brought down a nuclear disaster of planetary scale, bigger than Chernobyl – but Japan's crony democracy, like its peers is hardwired to only react with panic to any disaster its incompetence produces. Bad panic or good panic, always panic.

Tuesday, November 12, 2013

Although severely damaged by the world public opinion fallout from the Fukushima disaster, the nuclear industry continues to claim nuclear power is the low carbon, oil saving energy of the future. Taking the lifetime of the civil nuclear power industry as starting in the late 1950s, however, it has already had a long period through the 1980s and 1990s when world reactor orders and completions were often zero per year. Public confidence is weak.

Monday, October 28, 2013

THE 100-YEAR CURSE
Within the next 15 – 20 years as many as 100 industry standard Westinghouse-type 900 MW PWR pressurized water reactors, concentrated in the "old nuclear' countries will have to be decommissioned, dismantled and their sites made safe - unless political deciders maintain the sinister farce of rubber stamping reactor operating lifetime extensions. The decontamination process could take as long as 100 years. In several countries, especially Germany, Switzerland and probably Japan the dangerous game of politically-decided reactor life extensions – to push back the date of final decommissioning - has already ended or is ending.

Wednesday, September 25, 2013

David Fessler writes: On July 6, 2013, Ralph Seidensticker quietly passed away in his home in Valencia, Calif. He was 81 years old.

If you ask 1,000 people who he was, it’s doubtful that more than one or two would know. Seidensticker was the pioneer in nuclear reactor design. He spent 58 years designing reactors for nuclear power plants as an Argonne National Laboratory engineer. Many of the 104 plants in use in the U.S. today use his design features.

Friday, July 19, 2013

ABENOMICS AND THE ATOM
The very same Reuters which rushed to be the first agency to spread the June news about Fukushima that “Tepco is being overwhelmed with contaminated liquids as it flushes water over the three reactors at the seaside plant that had meltdowns after an earthquake and tsunami two years ago”, with Strontium-90 levels 125 times above the pre-catastrophe level, now tells us that restarting Japan's nuclear power fleet is seen by “Abe” and his team as the must have to top all must haves. Reuters reported today (18 July) that:

Tuesday, July 16, 2013

So much for the lessons of Fukushima. Never mind oil spills, the Russian Federation is preparing an energy initiative that, if it has problems, will inject nuclear material into the maritime environment.

Speaking to reporters at the 6th International Naval Show in St. Petersburg, Baltiskii Zavod shipyard general director Aleksandr Voznesenskii said that the Russian Federation's first floating nuclear power plant "should be operational by 2016."

Saturday, July 13, 2013

There's a three year downward trend in Chinese imports underway. The chart below, from Nomura Global Economics, shows the trend quite clearly.

China's exports and imports declined again in June. Exports fell 3.1 percent yoy - the most since the global financial crisis in 2008 - while imports dropped 0.7 percent. The poor June report follows a May collapse in export gains - fake invoices had inflated data for the first four months of the year, the bogus data enabled exporters to evade currency controls and bring extra money into the country. Trade growth might come in below the government's target of eight percent for the year.

Friday, May 31, 2013

The nuclear renaissance, and a bull market you should be aware of, has been restarted.

State of nuclear power in the USA

The USA has 104 nuclear power reactors in 31 states. Since 2001 these plants have achieved an average capacity factor of over 90 percent, generating up to 807 billion kWh per year and account for 20 percent of total electricity generated.

Wednesday, May 08, 2013

Peter Symonds writes: The Wall Street Journal published an article on May 1 entitled “Japan’s nuclear plan unsettles US.” It indicated concerns in Washington that the opening of a huge reprocessing plant could be used to stockpile plutonium for the future manufacture of nuclear weapons.

The Rokkasho reprocessing facility in northern Honshu can produce nine tonnes of weapons-grade plutonium annually, or enough to construct up to 2,000 bombs. While Japanese officials insist that the plutonium will be used solely to provide nuclear power, only two of the country’s 50 nuclear power reactors are currently operating.

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